To Reach a Milestone, or Grasping at Stones

So congratulations are in order to everyone on the Flat Earth team, as we’ve officially reached our first Milestone! What this means is that we’re able to confidently look back over the original design and technical documents and see that we have definitely implemented… all of the features from the first milestone and half of those from the second, we weren’t expecting and a fair chunk of audio done which we weren’t expecting.

Hrmm.

Ok, so congratulations are in order to everyone on the Flat Earth team, as we’ve officially reached our first and a halfth Milestone!

So evidently it’s very very easy to get trapped in a cycle of just continuing to work on the feature which is right in front of you in favour of the bigger picture.

That said, we now have an avatar which moves in all directions, is fully animated, can bump into objects and can even chop down trees, or about 140% of the originally required features.

Still, there’s a very good reason milestones exist, and it’s precisely to stop, refocus and make sure the game as it’s currently being produced still matches the core vision, or to give you that moment of pause where you realise that one or two of the concepts being touted in the original design documents are no longer relevant, possible or fun.

We’ve just done a round of meetings with everyone on the art and sound teams, and are now on a mission straight for our next big deadline, here being committed to publicity so as to ensure our dogged and determined enthusiasm for reaching it on time: Sunday 2nd September.

The aim is to have created a world where the player can navigate, harvest any and all basic resources (of which there are about 20) and have those resources know how to grow, be chopped down (an oddity to have to teach to a tree, but there you go), and stay chopped down (also bizarre).

Work has begun in earnest on the NPCs themselves, who already have a spritely (see what I did threre?) multitude of clothing options to choose from, while some final texturing work is being done on our first main character.

Challenges aplenty have popped up already, and I know we’ve got plenty more where that came from, so onwards and upwards as we find out the hard way what the next major unforeseen dilemma will be. Yyyyaaaaaarrrgh! (*Enthusiastic pirate boarding an enemy ship via a rope noise*)